Slave Trade History Sites in Tanzania
The sites of the East African slave trade: the former market and cathedral in Stone Town, the holding chambers at Mangapwani, and the caravan terminus and mission at Bagamoyo.
The sites of the East African slave trade at Stone Town, Mangapwani, Bagamoyo and along the caravan route inland are visited history rather than attractions. This guide sets out what the record documents, what historians dispute about the chambers and about Bagamoyo, and how abolition actually happened, in stages, over thirty six years.
Safaris That Include Slave Trade History Tours
Slave Trade History Tours Guide in Tanzania
What these places are, and how to approach them
The sites connected to the East African slave trade are among the most visited historical places in Tanzania, and they are not attractions. They are the physical remains of a system that moved and destroyed an enormous number of lives, and they are visited by Tanzanians as much as by foreigners, often by people whose families have a direct connection to what happened.
The main places are the former slave market site in Stone Town, where Christ Church Cathedral now stands; the coral cave and underground chamber at Mangapwani on Unguja's north-west coast; Bagamoyo, with its Catholic mission and museum and the nearby ruins at Kaole; and the inland points on the caravan route, above all Ujiji and Kwihara near Tabora.
A visitor does not need to arrive with any particular emotion prepared. What is useful is accurate information, because a great deal of what is said at these sites is uncertain, contested, or simply repeated from other tour copy. This guide sets out what is documented, what is disputed, and where the honest answer is that nobody knows.
The trade this history belongs to
The Indian Ocean slave trade was older than the Atlantic trade and structured differently. People were taken from the interior of east and central Africa, marched to the coast along caravan routes that also carried ivory, and sold into the Omani-Zanzibari world and onward to Arabia, Persia and India. Others were kept on the islands, where from the 1820s the clove plantations of Unguja and Pemba consumed labour on a large scale.
That plantation economy is not a separate story from the trade. It is the reason much of it happened. The clove industry that made Zanzibar wealthy was built deliberately, by a ruler who saw that the islands suited the crop and pursued the forced labour required to grow it. The spice tours that visitors take today walk through the descendants of that industry.
Ivory matters as much as people do to understanding the routes, and it is routinely left out. The caravans that came down from the lakes carried both, and on some routes ivory was the dominant cargo by value.
The former slave market site in Stone Town
The open slave market in Zanzibar Town stood at Mkunazini. It was closed in June 1873 under the treaty described below. The land was acquired by the Universities' Mission to Central Africa in September 1873, and the cathedral was erected on it under Bishop Edward Steere from December of that year. Sources differ on the completion date, with the Anglican Diocese giving 1880 and most other accounts 1879, which probably reflects the difference between the fabric being finished and the works closing.
The site is owned and run by the Anglican Church. By 2013 the cathedral was in danger of collapse, and the Diocese and the Zanzibar Government asked World Monuments Fund Britain for help. The cathedral was placed on the 2014 World Monuments Watch, and a European Union grant funded structural repair and the creation of a heritage centre interpreting the slave trade and its abolition. That exhibition opened in 2016 and is the substantial part of a visit today. It is well made, and by the account of researchers who have studied the site it is considerably closer to the historical record than what preceded it.
In the courtyard is a memorial sculpture by Clara Sörnäs, made at the arts institute in Bagamoyo: five figures standing in a sunken pit, chained at the neck with chains that are themselves historic. It is the most effective thing on the site, partly because it does not explain itself.
Stone Town as a whole was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000, and the inscription's sixth criterion rests directly on this history, citing the town's symbolic importance in the suppression of slavery, both as a major slave-trading port and as the base from which opponents of the trade, Livingstone among them, ran their campaign.
The custodians publish their own account of the trade's scale, giving annual imports to Zanzibar in the early nineteenth century of around fifteen thousand people, of whom just over sixty per cent were re-exported northward. Those are the Diocese's figures, given without citation, and are worth hearing as the custodian's account rather than as settled scholarship. The Diocese also hedges its own best-known claim, describing the market as reputed to be the last open slave market in East Africa rather than asserting it.
What historians dispute about the chambers
Visitors are taken down into two low underground chambers and told they are cells where people were held before sale. This is the part of the visit that people remember, and it is the part that should be treated with the most care.
The authenticity of those chambers as slave-holding cells is disputed in the academic literature. A study of the site published in 2020 argues that the Old Slave Market has been constructed as a place of memory at the expense of historical reality, and characterises the heritage site in terms of a myth produced by sensationalisation. Among the evidence it records is a map of Stone Town dated 1892 which labels the site of the present memorial as Kwa Kimoto, after a family living in the district, with no mention of the cloister at all. It also records that the authenticity of the chambers is contested within Zanzibar itself, using family histories and archives that circulate locally.
This does not mean the market did not exist, or that it was not here. The market is documented, its closure is documented, and the mission's acquisition of the land is documented. What is in question is the specific claim made to visitors standing in a specific small room.
Two other claims commonly made on tours are worth flagging. The first is that the cathedral's altar stands exactly where the whipping post stood. That appears on almost every tour page, and no institutional source carries it: not the World Monuments Fund, not the Diocese's own heritage material, not the UNESCO record. It may be stated in the site's own interpretation, and it may be true, but it should be heard as the site's account rather than as documented fact. The second is a set of very precise numbers about how many chambers exist and how many people were held in each. Those circulate widely and could not be traced to any institutional source at all.
The useful posture is neither credulity nor cynicism. This is the recognised memorial to a real market on or very near its site, and some of what is said inside it is more certain than the rest.
Mangapwani
Roughly twenty kilometres north of Zanzibar Town, at Mangapwani, there are two separate structures that tour narratives routinely merge into one. Keeping them apart is the whole of understanding the place.
The first is a large natural coral cavern, entered through a small opening, with masonry steps leading down to a pool of fresh water. Those steps were already there when the British administrator Major Pearce visited in around 1920. The Zanzibari heritage authority's own account describes the cave's use in connection with the trade as a suggestion rather than an established fact.
The second, a short distance away, is a man-made chamber: a rectangular pit cut into the stone, roughly three metres by fourteen and three and a half metres deep, with masonry roofing at ground level. The Zanzibar Department of Museums and Antiquities attributes its construction to slave traders, and it is commonly credited to a trader named Mohammed bin Nassor al-Alawi. The reading usually offered, that it was used to conceal people after the seaborne trade was prohibited, is plausible and is the account given locally, but it is presented by historians as a suggestion rather than as proven.
So the chamber is man-made and attributed by the heritage authority to slave traders, while the cave is natural and its connection less certain. The single dramatic story fusing the two is not what the custodians say.
Bagamoyo, and what the record actually shows
Bagamoyo is presented in most tourist material as a major slave port, the place where the caravans ended and the ships were loaded. The peer-reviewed research does not support that.
A study published in 2013 tested the claims made in Tanzania's own 2006 UNESCO application against archives in Tanzania, Zanzibar, Berlin, London, Edinburgh and France. It concluded that enslaved people did not make up a significant share of Bagamoyo's exports, that the numbers in circulation have been greatly exaggerated, and that what put Bagamoyo on the map was the ivory trade, which the UNESCO application does not mention at all. The same researcher, and another working independently, found no evidence for Bagamoyo as a major slave port, and their work instead corroborated Kilwa in that role. On the buildings identified locally as a slave market, he found no record of when such a market closed, which gives reason to think it was neither permanent nor substantial, and raised the possibility that local memory of a market had transferred onto the German customs house.
The widely repeated etymology, that Bagamoyo means lay down your heart because enslaved people abandoned hope there, is treated sceptically in the same work. A competing reading connects the name to the relief of porters at the end of a long march. Neither should be asserted.
What Bagamoyo genuinely is remains substantial. It was the coastal terminus of the central caravan route, and the surviving fabric of that trade is real: the Caravan Serai, the Old Market, the customs house, the old fort. The Holy Ghost Fathers founded a mission here in 1868 under Father Antoine Horner, the first Catholic mission in East Africa, established to house children rescued from slavery and later growing into church, school, workshops and farms. Archival records show that between 1873 and 1877 that mission received one hundred and sixty-six liberated people handed over by British anti-slavery cruisers, the great majority of them women and children. The freedom village and the mission museum are the most historically grounded part of a Bagamoyo visit.
Five kilometres east are the Kaole ruins, coral-stone remains of a Swahili settlement dating from roughly the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with two mosques and around thirty tombs including pillar tombs, first studied by the archaeologist Neville Chittick in the late 1950s. These predate the caravan trade entirely and belong to the older Swahili coast, covered under archaeological tours.
The route inland
Tanzania has nominated the Central Slave and Ivory Trade Route for World Heritage listing. The dossier was submitted in February 2006 and the route remains on the tentative list. It identifies six centres, Bagamoyo, Mamboya, Mpwapwa, Kilimatinde, Kwihara near Tabora and Ujiji, and describes the route from Ujiji to the coast as running over twelve hundred kilometres. The name of the nomination is worth noticing: it says ivory as well as slaves, which is more than most retellings manage.
At Kwihara, outside Tabora, stands a tembe built in 1857 by a wealthy Arab trader and later given to Livingstone. Gazetted as a monument in 1957, it is the only significant surviving building of an inland trading settlement that had grown to thousands by the 1870s.
Ujiji, five kilometres from Kigoma station on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, was the last major trading centre on the route. The Usagara grounds there are identified as a place where people were held and auctioned, and the site of Tippu Tip's house is among its landmarks. Ujiji is better known to most visitors for the meeting of Stanley and Livingstone, which is the smaller part of what happened there.
Tippu Tip himself, properly Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab al-Murjabi, was born around 1832 and died in Zanzibar in 1905. An Omani-Zanzibari ivory and slave trader and caravan leader, he built a territory in the eastern Congo centred on Kasongo while remaining nominally loyal to the Sultan, and left an autobiography.
How the trade was ended, in stages
Abolition is usually compressed on tours into a single date. It was a sequence, and the sequence is more interesting than the compression.
- 5 June 1873. The treaty signed at Zanzibar by John Kirk for Britain and Nasir bin Said for Sultan Barghash. Its first article ended the export of slaves from the mainland coast, its second closed all public markets in the Sultan's dominions for buying and selling imported slaves, and its third bound the Sultan to protect liberated people. It ended the seaborne trade and the public markets. It did not end slavery.
- 18 April 1876. Two further proclamations, both read into the British parliamentary record. One prohibited the conveyance of slaves by land under any conditions, issued after people were found being walked overland from Kilwa for shipment to Pemba, and instructed coastal governors to seize offenders. The other forbade the arrival of slave caravans from the interior and the fitting out of caravans by the Sultan's subjects. Most accounts compress these two into a single decree.
- 1890. A decree under Sultan Ali bin Said prohibited all exchange, sale or purchase of slaves, closed slave-trading offices, allowed enslaved people to buy their freedom through the kadhis, and gave them legal standing to bring complaints.
- 1897. Full legal abolition under Sultan Hamoud bin Mohammed, accompanied by judicial reform.
- 1909. Concubinage, which had remained legal under the earlier decrees, was prohibited.
Thirty-six years separate the closing of the market from the last of those steps. That gap is the most important thing to take from these sites: it is why the remains at Mangapwani exist at all.
Visiting with care
A few practical things make a difference.
- Guides vary enormously. A good guide at the Stone Town site will distinguish between what is documented and what is traditionally said. It is entirely reasonable to ask how something is known.
- Allow enough time. The exhibition rewards a slow read and most people rush it because it is treated as one stop on a walking circuit.
- Photography. Take very few, and none of other visitors. People come to these places for personal reasons, and being photographed while doing so is intrusive. Inside the chambers, consider not photographing at all.
- Children. The material is not graphic, but it is unambiguous. Older children generally manage it well if they have been told beforehand what the place is.
- Dress. The Stone Town site is an active cathedral. Cover shoulders and knees.
- Bundling. These sites are frequently sold in a package with a spice farm or a food market. That is a scheduling convenience rather than a thematic one, and going straight from the chambers to a fruit tasting is a jarring hour. Consider separating them.
On money: no published statement could be found setting out who receives visitor revenue at the Stone Town site, at Mangapwani or at the Bagamoyo museum, or how any of it is used. What is documented is custody rather than distribution. The Stone Town site is owned by the Anglican Diocese and Mangapwani is administered by the Zanzibar Department of Museums and Antiquities. If where the money goes matters to you, it is a fair question to ask on the day, and no claim to the contrary should be accepted without it.
Questions travellers ask
How long should I allow for the Stone Town site?
An hour and a half is a reasonable minimum if you intend to read the exhibition rather than walk past it. Many itineraries allocate half that, which is enough to see the cathedral and the memorial but not enough for the interpretation, which is the substantial part.
Are the underground chambers really slave-holding cells?
They are presented that way, and historians have questioned whether they served that function. A study of the site records an 1892 map that labels the location after a local family with no mention of the structure. The market itself is documented and its closure is documented; the specific identification of these rooms is less certain than a visitor is usually told.
Was Bagamoyo a major slave port?
The peer-reviewed research says no. A study testing the claims against archives in six countries concluded that enslaved people were not a significant share of Bagamoyo's exports, that the figures in circulation are greatly exaggerated, and that ivory is what made the town important. Kilwa is the port that research corroborates in the role usually assigned to Bagamoyo.
Do I need a guide?
At the Stone Town site the exhibition stands on its own, and a thoughtful visitor can do without one. At Mangapwani, Bagamoyo and the inland sites a guide adds a great deal, because there is far less interpretation in place. Ask how they know what they are telling you; the good ones welcome it.
Can I combine this with other sites in Stone Town?
Easily, since the main sites sit within a short walk of each other and of the ferry port. Whether you should combine it with a spice farm or a food market in the same outing is a different question, and many people find the transition uncomfortable.
Is it appropriate to bring children?
Many Tanzanian families do. The exhibition is factual rather than graphic. Prepare older children beforehand and be ready to leave early with younger ones.
Where does the entrance money go?
Nobody publishes it. The Stone Town site is owned by the Anglican Diocese and Mangapwani is administered by the Zanzibar museums authority, but no statement of how visitor revenue is used could be found for either, or for Bagamoyo. It is a fair thing to ask at the site.
What should I read before going?
Abdul Sheriff's economic history of Zanzibar, which traces how enslaved labour in clove production and rising demand for ivory built the commercial empire, is the standard work and is the best preparation for understanding what these places were part of.